“The architecture of the new plan, as if to compensate for the sober event-management calculations around which it is organized, tends toward the frenetic, like the second half of a Pixar movie. Its gestures are oversized and occasionally overwrought, its colors perma-bright.”

“A masterpiece is usually thought the work of a single artistic or design intelligence. But Riverside Park (including Riverside Drive, for they are inseparable as experienced) is the work not only of Moses, but of Frederick Law Olmsted, the great landscape genius behind Central Park, and the almost unknown Clifton Lloyd, the architectural engineer whom Moses picked to realize his vision.”

“Instead of coming up with something relevant to the place, telling a story about what came before or revealing previously overlooked visual details within a city, these structures don’t connect with any local authenticity or individuality in these cities. They’re not architecture at all, in a sense; they’re more like huge pieces of urban jewelry draped over a city’s chest, like some crazed husband throwing Bulgari at his wife, hoping it will finally make her love him.”

“As Thomas Heatherwick’s projects have grown larger, and entangle private wealth with government financing, they present the public with a quandary: Should communities accept the unasked-for gift of a design perhaps more ambitious than what might result from limited public funds, developed in a public process?”

“The question naturally arises, then, of what to do in terms of contemporary programming — because the irony, at least in terms of the permanent collection, is that the institution can’t actually do anything. Unlike other large museums, the Barnes cannot rotate objects in and out of active display or organize special shows using these works to bring particular artists or styles to light. Each piece must remain exactly where it is, forever.”

“Whatever happens with the merged magazines, it looks bad. You can read it as another chapter in the sad decline of print. But scrutinizing the tea leaves, you can also see it as another augury that the discourse of art is more and more subordinate to fashion-obsessed celebrity and short-term finance.”

At the Philbrook, Randall Suffolk boosted attendance by 63 percent and almost tripled participation in educational programs. “We’ve tried to reinvent our relationship with our community,” he said. Suffolk spearheaded the planning for Philbrook Downtown, a 30,000-square-foot satellite facility that opened in 2013.

“Sometimes you have to think the unthinkable. If we want museums to prosper and thrive in a harsh economic climate with central government talking about 40% cuts, an entrance fee may be the best way forward. And it may have a good side.”

“I’ve been going to the Venice Biennale for at least a decade and always enjoy the stimulation of seeing the work of new and up-and-coming artists,” Allen, who co-founded Microsoft Corp. with Bill Gates, said in a telephone interview. “In 2013 I started thinking, ‘what’s keeping us from doing this in Seattle?’”

The bronze cast of Young Girl with Serpent was taken from a Beverly Hills home in 1991. The story of its discovery and restitution features an ace investigator, a sharp-eyed Rodin scholar, a recalcitrant dealer, and a filing mistake.

Peter Brant has sold his 100% ownership interest in Art in America magazine, founded in 1913, to the company that publishes rival Artnews, and he will in turn become the majority shareholder in that company.

Alex Farquharson is the choice. “The 45-year-old founded the £20m Nottingham Contemporary in 2009 with an exhibition of David Hockney’s work from the 1960s. That same year he was on the selection committee for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where the UK was represented by 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen. In its first five years, Nottingham Contemporary has attracted more than a million visitors.”

“[The museum] has already been disrupted by more than 50 days of walkouts by staff since plans to [privatise] visitor services and security were first revealed. The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union said it had served notice of four more separate days of industrial action, with a continuous, all-out strike starting on Aug. 17.”

Hirschfeld archivist David Leopold: “He always felt that we all have this ability to recognize a friend from the back, a block away, wearing an overcoat. He didn’t know how we do that. But he was always going for that telling gesture, that arch of the eyebrow.”

Founder Thomas Zollinger: “The Body and Freedom Festival … aims to explore the possibilities of the naked body in urban space and everyday situational life, thereby contributing to its establishment in this context as an instrument of art expression.”

“The Icelandic Art Center (IAC) in Reykjavik – the commissioner of artist Christoph Büchel’s mosque in a disused church at this year’s Venice Biennale which was shut down by city authorities – has filed a claim seeking the immediate reopening of the project … [which] was closed late May after being open for only two weeks.”

“Buoyed by strong international tourism, a spate of well-attended shows and a seven-day-a-week schedule, the Metropolitan Museum of Art drew 6.3 million visitors in the last year, the most since it began tracking these statistics more than 40 years ago.”

“Instead of building up and out, the alternative plan, developed by New York architect David Helpern, would largely reconfigure the museum’s existing space. Much of the expansion would take place below grade, an approach employed at London’s British Museum, the Morgan Library & Museum and others.”

“Amid the turmoil at S.C. State University, which is scrambling to put its financial house in order, another drama is playing out on the Orangeburg campus of the historically black school. It’s a controversy within a controversy, and a significant collection of art is caught in the middle.”

“These great names are now in the collection of the Nelson-Atkins. And the replicas are carefully hung, in their original decorative frames, on the walls in Henry Bloch’s home. ‘They’re just wonderful. They are absolutely identical,’ Bloch says. ‘I often say, are you sure you gave me the copies?'”

“A pioneer of assemblage art, collector, autodidact, Christian Scientist, pastry-lover, experimental film-maker, balletomane and self-declared white magician, he roved freely through the fields of the mind while inhabiting a personal life of extraordinarily narrow limits. He never married or moved out of his mother’s house in Queens and rarely voyaged further than a subway ride into Manhattan, despite being besotted with the idea of foreign travel and particularly with France.”

“What if, instead of selling off great works of art, councils charged for admission? What harm would that do to education and public access? None. People would pay the entrance. School trips would go on, as they do now.”

“One thing I say in my sometime talk with regular folks who say they hate some art is that that’s good, it’s an authentic response. But maybe linger a little. Have another response. You might hate it even more, but you’ll have learned something about yourself. Resisting a new experience is really a sign of physiological health: we are whole from moment to moment and then we encounter something contradictory, and the proper first instinct is to feel threatened and to fight it.”

“The French police have detained a low-level employee of the National Library of France in connection with the disappearance of a collection of 43 engravings by 16th-century artists valued at up to $4.4 million. It was the second theft uncovered at the library this year.”

“Xiao Yuan, 57, a curator at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in southern China, sold 125 of the exhibits for more than 34m yuan (£4m, $6m). In his defence, he told Guangzhou People’s Intermediate Court there were already fakes in the storeroom when he started work there.”

“In the Bouches-du Rhône in Arles, archaeologists have uncovered a sumptuous ancient treasure in what remains of a Roman villa dating from the 1st century BCE … After spending more than 2,000 years largely underground, the colors are still shimmering.”

“The rush of news and the controversy surrounding Fairey’s arrest have re-ignited a debate over the value of street art, its connection to unauthorized graffiti and vandalism and the increasing role that public art is playing in revitalizing and beautifying the city in myriad neighborhoods, from southwest Detroit to Eastern Market, downtown, the Grand River corridor and elsewhere.”